Intense enforcement should be saved for violent criminals, he said. He wants more officers walking beats, rebuilding the department's frayed relationships with citizens.
Jack McDevitt, director of Northeastern University's Institute on Race and Justice, said there was no one-size-fits-all solution for keeping citizens safe in towns struggling with drugs and violence.
"Some big-city solutions may not work in the small towns," McDevitt said.
It's a lesson that is slow to arrive in the Philadelphia suburbs. Some small-town chiefs are still pushing the crackdowns on minor offenses, citing the New York success, hoping it will be a silver bullet to end violent crime.
Darby, Coatesville and Pottstown for years made arrests at per-capita rates higher than New York's, even at the height of the city's "stop-and-frisk" campaigns in the 1990s. The result? Crime went up in all three towns since 2000.
In all three towns, and others around the state, the tactics fell much more harshly on African Americans. This disparity was even more pronounced in juvenile arrests: In Norristown, a town about a third black, more than three-fourths of all juveniles arrested during the last decade were African American.
Community policing
If high-arrest rates are not the solution, what is? Other cities are trying alternative methods, with some success.
Community policing, the new Baltimore model, is also the philosophy driving a North Carolina town's program, which the Justice Department calls one of the most innovative in America.
Chief James Fealy, of High Point, N.C., says he learned his lesson while running narcotics squads in Austin, Texas.
After a period of high-arrest tactics, in which mostly young black men were searched, one black community leader told him that his officers were "almost as bad as the dope dealers."
"It was like an old 1950s dragnet," Fealy said. "I swore I'd never do that again."
